1. Field of the Invention
The invention pertains to the field of precious metal authenticity verification. More particularly, the invention pertains to structures, systems, and methods for verification of the purity, authenticity, and ownership tracking of precious metals.
2. Description of Related Art
Investment grade precious metal bars and rounds are produced in a variety of sizes, shapes, and purities. Precious metal rounds generally have a cylindrical or coin shape and are generally around 1 troy ounce in weight, although rounds in weights up to 100 kilograms have been produced. Precious metal bars are more commonly larger than rounds. Bars are generally commercially available in weights from about 1 troy ounce to over 1,000 troy ounces, in the case of Commodities Exchange (COMEX) “good delivery” ˜400 oz. gold and ˜1000 oz. silver bars. Precious metal bars and rounds are bought, sold, and traded daily by and between private individuals, retail dealers, wholesalers, and refiners.
The high value of precious metal, especially gold in even small amounts and silver bars of 100 troy ounces or more, makes them subject to theft, tampering, and outright counterfeiting. Conventional bars are typically formed en masse without any particular security features that can be used to identify a particular bar as belonging to a particular owner. Serial numbers appearing on some bars are seldom recorded for ownership identification purposes, and to date, there is no central global registry of ownership information to thwart theft. Conventional bars are also generally formed with substantially flat sides permitting core-drilling of the bars and insertion of inexpensive metal alloy slugs, creating “salted” or counterfeit bars of resulting substantially diminished value. These bars are then reintroduced into commerce to unsuspecting buyers.
Silver has a distinctive “ping” sound (resonance frequency) when struck. This is a longstanding and simplified technique used to tell if a silver bar is genuine or a lead, tungsten, or metal alloy counterfeit. The problem in the existing art is that there is no convenient way for a buyer or dealer to try to get a reliable and suitably repeatable (standardized), recognizable “ping” out of the multitude of forms that silver bars and rounds come in. Typically, another hard object, such as another bar or metal object, is used to strike the silver bar is or round being examined for authenticity to elicit the distinctive “ping”. Even then, there is no standard resulting “ping” frequency to recognize, and producing a sufficient “ping” is not always easily accomplished due to the physical characteristics and various form configurations of the given bars or rounds.
It is these aforementioned deficiencies in the current state of the art that the present invention seeks to address and resolve.